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SATURDAY, NOV. 13, 1920.
THE TOILER
J
PAGE IS
Pity The Poor Employer!
By Wililam Hard, .
Staff Correspondent for the Federated Press.
I ask the American Labor Movement to rise
and shed a solemn tear of sympathy for a cer
tain sort of American employer. He is not very
happy. And he Ls frightfully overworked.
Just think of what he has to do besides the
ordinary old-fashioned running of his business!
Bright and early in the morning he picks up
the consolidated report of the daily endeavors of
his detectives who watch his employes. He
learns that Jacik Slaminsky and Tony Pretorio
were heard yesterday to say that there was
going to be a union meeting in the rear of
Lanopboropoulos' fruit store. He calls for the
employment record cards of Jack Slaminsky
and Tony Petrario and studies them anxiously,
including place of birth, name of mother, and
checkmarks indicating behavior while working
for previous employers. He calls for the em
ployment manager to interpret the check
marks. He phones the head of the detective
agency to hire another detective to watch the
detectives watching Jack and Tony.
The brightness of the morning is broken. He
turns with clouded brow to his incoming busi
ness mail. Ah! A letter from the Industrial
American Corporatio7i! This corporation will
furnish a weekly printed talk to be slipped into
the pay-envelope of every employe each week
along with his pay. The employe will read this
talk and will learn that most employers make
very small profits and that the cemeteries of
Moscow are full of workmen who have starved
to death under Bolshevism, and then the imi
ploye will appreciate his employer and not join
a union. Sixteen specimens of these talks en
closed. Our conscientious manufacturer of warm
worsteds for an otherwise shivering public
reads the sixteen specimens. He had though:
that no further solutions of the Labor problem
in his factory would be necessary after his
recent purchase of the "Man-to-Man Method"
of the Industrial Peace Bureau. Under this
method the door of the office of the employ
ment manager is kept open by a catch or a
brick and any employe could always walk in
and bawl out the company to him man to man.
Yet now Jack and Tony were going to meet
with some Bolsheviks in the back-room of a
fruitstore.
Our over worked or, at least, overwrought
manufacturer meditates a bit on Bolshevism.
His gloom is increased by a lady who bursts in
to the room over the protests of the office boy
and looses on him a great wind of cheery sta
tistics about the number of un-Americanised
aliens in town and the number attending the
classes in English given by her branch of the
new society for courses of lectures on the con
stitution. He can clearly perceive she thinks
that a diligent stndy of the Constitution by
the- employe of worsted mills is today quite
essential to the efficiency of the worsted in
dustry. Our manufacturer perhaps reflects that he
has not yet had time this morning to do any-
A Trap that's always set.